According to this article, the group has been getting around 80 million a year from the state. Public money going to private business.

The owner, David Brennan, actually wears a white hat.

Picture from Ohio.com. White Hat was established in 1998 by Akron businessman David L. Brennan, who was a key advocate for introducing charter schools in Ohio. Like most charter schools, White Hat’s Hope Academies and Life Skills Centers are primarily funded by the state based on the number of pupils they enroll. The contracts between White Hat and the schools now suing allow the company to collect virtually all the funds and use them to run the schools.

Congratulations are in order to Kasich pal David Brennan and his White Hat Management company for being awarded two more charter schools by the Ohio Department of Education despite the worst list of accomplishments we may have ever seen. And with these additional schools, it is likely that White Hat schools will top $1 billion in revenue in Ohio.

More about their revenues:

White Hat Management Company

School Revenues in Ohio since 1999: $818,919,080.00

Enrollment: Peaked at 13,683 statewide in 2004-2005; 25% decline in past five years

Total schools: 30 (minus 4 that were closed for academic reasons or contractual non-compliance)

The Schools Matter Blog has more about these schools, and a video is there about Governor Kasich and David Brennan.

The article points out that White Hat gets to keep their info secret from the public whose money they are taking. There have been lawsuits, not sure of their outcomes.

Earlier this month, Brennan successfully lobbied the GOP-led Ohio House for a amendment that would allow White Hat to keep secret details of how it spends the public money it receives to run its K-8 Hope Academies and its LifeSkills Center high schools, including Life Skills Center-Springfield at 1637 Selma Road. The legislation, contained in the House version of Gov. John Kasich’s two-year budget bill, is now before the Ohio Senate Finance Committee, where seven of the eight members of the Republican majority have received campaign contributions from Brennan.

Akron-based White Hat is the state’s largest charter school operator and one of the nation’s biggest for-profit charter chains.

Last year White Hat’s Ohio schools received more than $78 million from the state, records show. Officials of the left-leaning think tank Innovation Ohio estimate White Hat schools have collected $500 million in taxpayer money since 2000.

Seems like they are getting much more by this year.

Here's the video from the link...And how are schools like pizza shops?

Things got so bad that White Hat was sued by 10 of its own charter schools...and that is really bad.

Stubbs, who sent his three children to Hope Academies and eventually sat on a number of White Hat school boards, said it took several years before some boards began to question why the schools continued to perform poorly. He said that when members started demanding more detailed accounting, the schools and the company began to clash.

.."The suit charges that White Hat lobbied the state legislature for changes to the charter school law in 2006 that made it possible for White Hat to fire any school board that tries to sever ties with the management company.

Nor is it financially feasible for a charter school to switch operators because White Hat's contracts state that it owns the school's property, furniture and equipment — even though they were all paid for with tax dollars, according to the complaint.

''Essentially, White Hat created an educational model where tax dollars flow to the private corporation with little room for oversight or control by the schools' governing bodies,'' said a news release accompanying the filing of the lawsuit.

The company that helped launch the charter-school movement in Ohio now faces so much competition that its founder told employees they are “in a fight for our lives.”

White Hat Management must increase enrollment and profit to save jobs, founder David Brennan told employees in a memo last month. He wrote that he has invested more than $50 million in the Akron-based company but can’t put more in.

His subsidies will last White Hat only through June 2013, Brennan said.

“We are in a fight for our lives. We are all hurting. We are asking everyone to sacrifice. We are trying to preserve the jobs of the 1,200 employees we presently have,” the memo says.